I've written about Brazil pre-Lula and post-Lula and spent the last five years covering all aspects of the country for Dow Jones, Wall Street Journal and Barron's. Meanwhile, for an undetermined amount of time, and with a little help from my friends, I will be parachuting primarily into Brazil, Russia, India and China. But will also be on the look out for interesting business stories and investing ideas throughout the emerging markets.

Sberbank Denies Funding Pro-Russia 'Terrorists' In East Ukraine

As chapters in the Russia-Ukraine political drama unfold, Russia’s largest bank takes center stage.

SberbankSberbank, Russia’s largest, is being investigated by Ukraine’s Attorney General for allegedly paying Ukrainian soldiers to join Russia.

In an 18 minute video “confession” of a camouflaged Ukrainian soldier, the man says with his back to the camera and seated in a wooden chair facing a decorative wall that Sberbank paid him 3,500 Ukrainian hryvnia a week — or $309 — to join Russian separatists in east Ukraine. In the video, allegedly recorded by Ukraine’s State Secret Service, the soldier says he and others were also offered $400 to leave cities like Donetsk.

Russia’s largest bank denies it was bribing Ukraine military to join the pro-Russia movements in Eastern Ukraine cities like Donetsk.

“Sberbank has formed compliance mechanisms which aim to monitor the implementation of national legislation regulation to fight the financing of terrorism. Sberbank emphasizes that the requirements of the relevant Ukrainian and international legislation are strictly observed with reference to the recommendations of the Financial Action Task Force on Money Laundering,” the bank said in a statement posted on its website. The task force was set up in 2002 as a means to deter financing terrorist acts.

Sberbank said Ukraine has not sent them or its Ukraine subsidiary any reports in connection with the allegations being made by the Attorney General (AG). Sberbank said it contacted the General Prosecutor’s Office of Ukraine with a request for more evidence, or refute the AGs claim.

Such a discovery would not bode well for Sberbank. It would surely lead to sanctions against it, impacting its branches in more than 20 countries, including the U.S. Sberbank also owns Russian mutual fund company Troika Dialog, which has offices in Midtown Manhattan overlooking Central Park.

On April 16, the State Security Service showcased to the media some items it seized from captured Russian spies and Ukrainian double-agents. Sberbank payment cards were among the items.

According to the State Security Service in Kiev, at least one Russian bank was transferring between $200 and $500 daily to payment cards held by military agitators.

The latest fight centers on the industrial city of Donetsk, which is roughly a two hour drive from the Russian border. The city council there wants to hold a vote of its citizens to either secede or become an autonomous region like Crimea to the south. Kiev saw this as a Russian intelligence operation following the successful annexation of Crimea by Russia last month. Crimea was a Ukrainian peninsula in the Black Sea, home to Ukrainian and Russian naval bases, and the historic city of Yalta.

Donetsk and a handful of other Eastern Ukraine cities have seen increased political unrest and violence between pro-Ukraine and pro-Russian groups. Secession is on the table yet again.

The drama began in late 2013 when Viktor Yanukovych, the pro-Russian president of Ukraine, rejected a trade deal with the European Union. Millions took to the streets in Kiev’s Independence Square to call for his ouster, saying he acted on behalf of a foreign government and not for the good of the country.

Ukraine’s leaders have been mired in political corruption scandals for decades and the country remains little more than a Russian outpost.

But on Feb. 22, when Yanukovych left office by extra-legal means, he was replaced by pro-Western leaders who have been pulling Ukraine closer to the U.S. and NATO, something Moscow disdains. As a result, more uprisings have been occurring in cities were ethnic Russians constitute half or more of the population.

On Thursday, U.S., European, Russian and Ukrainian diplomats met in Geneva to broker a peace deal. Secretary of State John Kerry warned that if Russia did not de-escalate tensions in eastern Ukraine, harsher economic sanctions would follow and news that Sberbank and a dozen other financial institutions may be funding terrorist activities will not sit well with Washington.

President Vladimir Putin later said that his country reserved the right to support ethnic Russians against the Ukrainian military.

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American corporations and crooked Congressmen team up with global corporations to destroy the earth..

For instance American corporate crooks joined Canadian corporate criminals to produce the filthiest, most climate changing toxic oil in the world.. tar sands.. which have destroyed a good part of Canada, and which they want to ship through the US in leaking pipelines to ship out to China, against the objections of people who want the environment to stay clean.

American corporations have all run over to China and other Asian countries where they can employ slaves and help turn China and nearly all of Asia into the toxic wasteland, corporate destroyed nightmares that they have become today.

Putin refused America’s GENETICALLY MODIFED crops that America peddles around the world.. resistant to herbicide and pesticide poisons but also having lethal pesticides built into the plants (90% of corn and soybean are GMO and they are planted into almost every packaged food) .. GMO is an environmental time bomb that not only makes people sick and kills, but wipes out pollinators.. birds, bees, butterflies, etc.. And when the companies sell these GMO poisons, they profit from the tons of pesticide/herbicide poisons they soak the plants with. BUT AMERICA WILL DO ANY CRIME THAT MAKES MONEY.. Obama is part of this gang and refused to listen to Putin’s objections about USA exporting GMO environmental terrorism companies.. MONSANTO, SYGENTA, DOW, BAYER, DUPONT all conspire to pass laws that prohibit labeling of GMO, attack small farmers using teams of lawyers, bribe corrupt congressmen, and commit crimes against the world environment while assaulting the health of the public for profits.

America calls everyone who doesn’t agree with it an “insurgent” or a “terrorist”.. how convenient.. but nevertheless incredibly stupid propaganda.. Ukrainians themselves see through it and they mistrust and dislike America for good reason. America wants Ukraine and its economy enslaved to the IMF and its people bankrupted and starving. America cares nothing that Ukranian people don’t want an unelected group of western controlled mafia stealing their government and that Crimeans are using self-determination to vote for their future.. Vietnamese, Libyans, Afghans, Iraqis, including children and families were all “insurgents” (who the US was hoping would hand over their resources), meaning candidates for US shock and awe mass murder. But this is different, Americans and their NATO clones can’t do shock and awe or drone children since they are faced with a retaliation factor of 3500 nuclear missiles that would turn the US into a radioactive desert a hundred times over. Good luck with that

Strange. Why would Sberbank – that is vulnerable to sanctions – involve itself in something every shady organization can do. If this would be true it would point to very disturbed reasoning at the Russian side.

Very strange. Again, this is a subsidiary, not under the watchful eye of Sberbank in Moscow. THe pictures I saw in the press looked like Sberbank credit cards. you and I can get sberbank credit cards if we are in Russia enough.

We should have been hurling cannon fodder at the Russkies by now. Let’s get this show on the road! Let’s see….The old “babies ripped from incubators” shtick won’t work. Could we fire puppies from the Russian side at Ukrainian school children?

No. I have a better idea. Let’s get the pundits on Fox News to discuss the possibility of Russia coming into Alaska! First, turn off the gas to Europe; break its economy. Then…march in Alaska and take over all the American oil and gas fields there. Bwa hha ha ha haha! And we shall do it at the midnight hour…because midnight is more eeeevil.

Kenneth, there actually WAS a made-for-TV movie along those lines… NBC showed it in 1982 : http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0084919/combined – in which the Soviets air-drop a light infantry division into Alaska to cut the oil pipeline after a military coup happens in the Soviet Union. And it happened at midnight, which in the part of Alaska where it was set, lasts a week or so. Plenty of time for an airborne op, only complicated by the fact that when you have to drop a deuce, everyone else in the unit has to cluster around you, their backs turned, so nothing else freezes and drops off (or so a Special Forces guy stationed there for exercises with the Alaska National Guard told me).